


Arrival

by Toxic_Waste



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Abandonment, Angst, Gen, Oneshot, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-24 15:28:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21640204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toxic_Waste/pseuds/Toxic_Waste
Summary: When she wakes up, she's a bit sore and not very well rested. Something went wrong yesterday - why can't she remember what?Set between Season Three and Season Four.
Relationships: Catra & Entrapta & Scorpia (She-Ra), Catra & Entrapta (She-Ra), Entrapta & Hordak (She-Ra)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 27





	Arrival

My head hurts.

That’s the first thing that I become aware of upon waking up: that my head hurts. It’s not like that sort of heavy, intense pounding that comes from fevers or the flu, but it’s still _there_ , a vague sort of dull ache floating just at the base of my skull… just enough to provide a twinge in my vision and remind me that, something, at the very least, is not quite right.

I’m also sore; I didn’t sleep well last night.

My leg cramps when I stir: I _definitely_ didn’t sleep well. Wrong side of the bed, at the very least. My entire body feels stiff, and for a moment I wonder if I fell out of my nest overnight without noticing.

That theory is summarily dismissed the next second, though: trying to sit up and stretch and unfurl my hair, I’m immediately struck by how muddy it is.

More than my hair is muddy, actually. It’s all in my hair, on my clothes, on my face. I blink, trying to wipe my forehead off, but when my glove is just as muddy as the rest of me, it doesn’t really work all that well.

I was lying facedown in a huge mudpuddle.

This… isn’t exactly what I expected. Frowning, I unfurl my hair and lift myself clear of the ground, trying to get a bearing on my surroundings. There’s… there’s mud, yeah. A whole beach of it, in fact. Down the beach, and it disappears into an endless gray sea that – at least for now – is lapping quietly at the shore.

Up the beach, and the mud gives way to rocks and dirt and… some kind of jungle? I frown, squinting. It’s no ordinary collection of trees, though. There’s something unnatural about them, and I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to figure out the spatiotemporal disturbances that seem native the Whispering Woods somehow.

…spatiotemporal disturbances!

My memory is starting to come back. I remember… I remember Hordak, yes. My lab partner. I can’t help but smile slightly at that: many hands make light work, after all. Even though I can manifest almost as many hands as I need to, it’s still – it’s a good change of pace. A second point of view, a fresh pair of eyes.

And the portal. Yes, yes, that’s it. I was working on a portal, Hordak and I were, and… something happened.

The headache flares up if I try too hard to remember that part. I can only vaguely conjure an image of computer screens and Adora with a gag in her mouth. But that’s the way it is with temporary amnesia. My memory will come back soon enough regardless: it always does.

I must have hit my head on something, I decide. Or something hit me. I can’t remember what exactly Adora was saying, what with that gag and all, but I can sort of remember that she didn’t seem terribly enthused. Something must have gone wrong, then.

I look around at my surroundings again. I’m alone, as far as I can tell. There’s no sign of the Fright Zone anywhere around. Just me and… hmm, what’s with all this stuff anyway?

I’ve sat myself back down on the ground now, back in the puddle I woke up in. Though there aren’t _people_ around, there is a whole lot of… random stuff. Crumpled papers, scraps of duct tape, bits of metal and empty toilet paper tubes. I kick a ball of tin foil in bemusement and it rolls until it comes to rest against a scattered mess of what looks like used tissue paper.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that it looked like the contents of the Fright Zone trash compactor – the giant holding facility I built to more efficiently gather all the waste of the area and crunch it into a single massive cube for it’s eventual transport and discard onto…

…onto Beast Island.

I blink, quickly looking around again. The beach, the desolate coast, the odd, unnatural (even mutated)-looking jungle lurking farther up the shore.

Beast Island? Is that where I am? Why? How?

 _Oh_.

The portal – of course. I can remember more now. Whatever conked me got me good, but it didn’t get me _that_ hard. I was working on the portal. By myself, even, Hordak left for some reason. Or had I left him? Well, that part I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter anyway. Adora, though – she did try to warn me. She must have seen that the portal was destablizing in some way.

She tried to warn me, didn’t she? And I remember that I did take her warning seriously eventually. I’m not usually one to spoil things with being paranoid, but Adora had been so convinced that I eventually decided to humor her. That was a thing that you did for friends, right? Humor them. I had turned away from the portal… and that’s all I can remember for now, again.

I must have just gotten unlucky: turning away just as the portal experienced some sort of meltdown. It must of thrown debris clear that… hmm, no.

Feeling myself all about with my hair, I can’t find any lumps on my head as if from some kind of mighty blow. I _do_ find scorch marks, though. Right on the back of my neck, just between the space where my oversuit’s rubber ends and my hairline begins. It’s not a bruise, it’s a burn.

I’ve even electrically shocked, it seems. No wonder my memory is weird and distorted. I must have turned away from the portal at just the wrong moment, cue meltdown, and it must have sent out some sort of current that took the path of least resistance straight into the back of my skull.

But the portal did more than that, though. Despite whatever meltdown may have occurred (and now that I think of it, I do recall that _something_ bad was happening with it), it still _worked_.

I may have been knocked out cold, but I’m also _here_ , and I am – inasmuch as I can tell – in one piece.

The portal must have _moved_ me – moved me from Point A to Point B without ever traversing the distance in between.

I feel like whooping, almost. Although a purely spacial portal is obviously much different from a portal that manages to link two _dimensions_ , it’s still a milestone – a proof of concept, and another completed cog in the grand machine.

The portal works. I’m thrilled. My formulae … could probably use a _little_ tweaking, to be fair, but the foundation is solid. Hordak is going to be _so_ happy. He was always so invested in having his portal built. (Which, I have to admit, is entirely fair. It _is_ a cool project, and if it works out, definitely has so much to promise. The math behind it is definitely a truckload of fun to puzzle out.)

I feel like whooping again, and I do. My voice echoes – and echoes, and echoes again. Then it abruptly stops, and suddenly I can feel… well, I don’t know. But I do feel _something_. It’s almost like I’m being watched, somehow.

There’s no-one here, though, I can see that. Lifting myself in the air with my pigtails, my eyelevel is almost fifteen feet above the ground. It means I can see 4 and 7/10ths of a mile to the horizon – and though it’s obviously a bit curtailed by the mist that’s hovering over the ocean, it’s still pretty clear that there’s no one else around at all, nor any sign of civilization to boot.

Which makes sense: it is Beast Island, after all, if my assumptions are correct, which at this point I have no reason to doubt.

Still, I do feel like I’m being… well, not exactly _watched_ , per se. There’s just a presence here, somehow.

I ignore it, though: it’s probably just the lingering effects of what was probably a very powerful electrical current sent through my brain and spinal cord as I was portaled here. And I have more important things to take care of at this point in time anyway. Hordak is still at the Fright Zone, and he’s gonna be _thrilled_ to hear this. Our experiment was successful!

Well, it was also a failure, but, really, it’s the same difference. Maybe there’s even some lingering fallout of being teleported so violently left on my person – a radiative field or somesuch sort of thing. All my internal organs _seem_ to be in order... but you never know with those squishy bits, really.

It’s all so exciting.

The adrenaline is helping my memories return, too, little by little, like beams of light refracted through a spectroscope gradually reforming themselves. Now I remember that I wasn’t alone when I blacked out. Scorpia and Catra were there too. I do hope they were okay: they were never unpleasant to me and we were statistically friends, and that is what humans do: hope their friends are okay.

Adora was in a different room: I also remember that. She’s probably okay, then. Oh, yes, she was tied to that pole. It was over the sword, as I recall. She didn’t want to give it up, but that was okay. When she saw the portal working, she probably changed her mind anyway. Who _wouldn’t_ change their mind? This technology held the potential to revolutionize the world!

First things first, though: before getting too excited. I need to get back in contact with the Fright Zone. There’s plenty of stuff around, though: all this debris piled in heaps across the beach is definitely good for _something_ , after all.

There’s tin foil and paper, duct-tape and even a cracked lighter drained of lighter fluid. It’s practically a gold mine. Longwave radio transmitters are pretty simple devices anyway.

Working is like having a syringe full of epinephrine shot straight into my spinal cord. Between my actual fingers and hair, everything comes to together really fast: and that’s not just the radio, either, but my memories too. It usually works like this – I know from experience – but it’s still always the same weird – almost tingly – feeling either way. I know brain tissue can't feel things in that manner, but it sure _seems_ that way sometimes.

I can remember more now, bits and pieces coming together just as surely as I fasten a makeshift antenna onto my transponder. I remember now why Adora was gone: I’d left the room where she’d been tied up.

I remember now why Hordak wasn’t around: I was making final adjustments to the portal on my own, it wasn’t actually a joint test or anything.

I remember staring a computer readout of a simulation I’d created seeing a predicted collapse the entire planet underneath the strain on spacetime a portal could well feasibly create.

I remember being shocked at that, and I’m still shocked a little now. (Thankfully, the planet seems to be okay for now. I’d hate to lose the planet itself – it would certainly make it awfully hard to keep learning things.)

I remember wanting to update Hordak on these findings, yes. That was why I left the room with Adora, that was where I ran into Scorpia and Catra. They were also shocked, it seemed. I remember that as well. Catra was even _angry_ for some reason – she hissed and nearly spit on me.

I remember deciding that they simply didn’t understand the urgency of the matter and deciding just to go straight to Hordak. Catra may have been Hordak’s second-in-command, and she _did_ generally operate under his direct orders, but some things she just didn’t quite seem to understand – and advanced theoretical physics did seem to be among them. It was okay, though, I had known. Hordak would understand.

I remember Catra didn’t seem convinced, even as I turned away.

I remember…

My hair stops moving on the transponder dial as the last piece of my fragmented memories clicked into place.

I remember it now – I remember the whole thing.

The receiver crackles to life with such a suddenness that it almost makes me jump.

“Base Camp Charlie,” it queries. “This is Alpha Unit C. Come in, Base Camp Charlie.”

“This is Charlie,” a different voice responds. “We read you, go ahead.”

“Roger. The remaining rubble of the implosion in Sector Five is clear. Fright Zone East Wall is secure again. Over.”

“Copy that. Lord Hordak has released a statement saying-”

 _crack_.

The radio antenna is surprisingly flimsy in my hair. It’s like breaking a single twig in two.

I blink, I blink, I blink again.

I remember everything now.

The portal’s implosion had been… a failure. Failure was _okay_ , failure was good, even. It told you where to watch your step the next time around. But… maybe it didn’t do that all the time.

I hadn’t managed to get the portal working, had I? And that had been a failure. And _that_ had been what they were after, all along. They – Hordak – he wanted his portal. Catra and Scorpia, they wanted the portal too, going along with the will of their boss.

I hadn’t provided, and they’d saw fit to terminate their end of the bargain in return.

Sinking back down to a seat in the mud, I pulled my knees to my chest. It was fitting, really. I… I don’t know. I tried _so hard_ to keep track of the data, the statistical readouts of my relationships with the other people in the Fright Zone.

“What was the point of that, then?” I ask aloud, using a pigtail to gently tip the radio over into the mud.

A drop flings itself onto my face, adding to the stuff already caked there.

At least the radio _works_. It does what it was supposed to do. Not the same with me, I guess. I… I don’t know what’s been going on with me, really. I lived so long alone in Dryl that I _genuinely_ can’t remember how old I am, though my estimates range in the area of 27-33, based on some radiometric dating I did.

I loved it. I always did. Part of me still cries out for it.

But then there had been the others. First, Adora, Bow, Glimmer and the rest. Promising interest in my experiments, seeming like they wanted to see all the cool stuff to be seen in the world and get excited with me over it.

They’d left me behind, though. I guess I wasn’t up to their standards, or something.

Then there had been the Fright Zone. Scorpia was nice to me. We shared hot chocolate. Catra was sometimes grumpy, but she appreciated my robots. Hordak was… was my lab partner. I don’t know what it was we shared, exactly.

They gave me all that cool stuff. I tried to repay them, really I did. That was what people did, right? I _tried_ to be a good friend and give them what they wanted.

And now here I am, tossed out with the trash, onto the _literal_ trashdump island.

I guess I'm just not built for this ‘other people’ thing, am I?

My facemask is horridly bent down the middle. It squeaks, and won't lower more than an inch. That’ll never do. A few minutes of rummaging in the garbage, and I’ve found a replacement that’s still in usable condition.

Failure is _good_ , I know this. I also knew right off the bat that I didn’t exactly… mesh well with either the Alliance or the Horde. I guess I just didn’t realize to what _extent_ that failure-to-mesh extended.

It’s okay, though. I kitted out Dryl from a bare stone castle into an epic place of awesome and wonder. I can do it again here, too. Beast Island may a trashdump, but it’s also so much more. More that I can find out about, if I put my mind to it. As for the others... well, they seemed happy before I showed up, and they're probably fine now, too. The Alliance didn't seem to miss me too much. Emily... well, Emily will probably be better off with people who understand that whole 'friendship' business better than I do anyway.

The looming presence in the woods is back, stronger, in the back of my mind.

Well, it would be amiss for me to go all this time without documenting at least _something_ in my records. Recordkeeping is, of course, an important part to all science.

Pulling out my recorder, I click it.

“Beast Island Log One, Day One, Hour… One? Let’s say two, to be safe.” I pause. “The… experimentation regarding human-to-human contact involving myself has… come to an unexpectedly abrupt conclusion. Most usable data has been lost, as I fear I was misinterpreting most of the trends I captured. I… I don’t feel there’s anything more to gained by farther research into this subject.”

Pulling my new mask down over my face, I lift myself on my pigtails and set off into the forest.


End file.
